Advisory Boards

ETHICS ADVISORY BOARD (EAB)

Mark Pritchard

Professor Pritchard studied Medicine at Manchester University (BSc (1st class Hons) in Medical Biochemistry, 1988; MB.ChB. (with Hons), 1991). After junior hospital posts (MRCP(UK) 1994), he returned to the University of Manchester to train in Gastroenterology and performed research on the genetic regulation of apoptosis in the GI tract (Digestive Disorders Foundation and MRC Clinical Research Training Fellowships leading to PhD, 1999). In 2000 he moved to the University of Liverpool as a clinical lecturer to complete clinical training in Gastroenterology. Following this he was awarded an Advanced Fellowship for Clinicians from the Wellcome Trust (2002-6) to study the importance of Helicobacter pylori-induced apoptosis during gastric tumour development. He was awarded the ASNEMGE Rising Star award in 2007 and the Sir Francis Avery Jones Research Medal of the British Society of Gastroenterology in 2008. He was appointed Clinical Senior Lecturer at the University of Liverpool in 2006, Professor in 2009, Head of the Department of Gastroenterology in 2010 and Head of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Physiology in 2016.

His current research focuses upon host factors which influence the development of gastrointestinal cancers and neuroendocrine tumours, in particular the importance of apoptosis, NF-κB signalling and the gastrin family of peptides. He is also an honorary Consultant Gastroenterologist at Royal Liverpool University Hospital, where he is the clinical lead of the Liverpool European Neuroendocrine Tumour Society (ENETS) Centre of Excellence and is involved in the clinical and endoscopic management of patients with gastroenteropancreatic neuroendocrine tumours. He also currently chairs the Gastroduodenal Section committee of the British Society of Gastroenterology.

Susanne Rensing

Susanne studied Veterinary Science at the Free University in Berlin. She is author of 26 articles mainly in journals within Immunology, Toxicology and Animal Welfare scope. She is member of the American Association of Laboratory Animals (AALAS), the European Society of Laboratory Animal Veterinarians (ESLAV), the German Society for Laboratory Animal Science (GV-Solas), the Association of Primate Veterinarians (APV), the European Primate Veterinarians (EPV), and International Primatological Society (IPS). Susanne represents AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co KG in the EFPIA RAW (Research & Animal Welfare) Group and Large Animal subgroup. She serves for AAALAC Int. as European Council Member; and is member of the Ethical Committee for Animal Research in Rhineland Palatinate and Tübingen of Germany.

After working as Clinical Veterinarian at the German Primate Center (Göttingen, Germany), in 2004 she joined Covance Laboratories GmbH (Münster, Germany) as Clinical Veterinarian and Animal Welfare Officer, Manager Lab Animal Care, and moved to other Covance sites (Vienna (VA, USA) and Chandler (AZ, USA)). From 2010 to 2012, she worked as Expert Animal Science and Welfare, Animal Welfare officer at Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany). In 2012, she joined AbbVie Deutschland GmbH & Co KG (Ludwigshafen, Germany), first as Head of Comparative Medicine and currently, since 2014, she is the Head of Animal Welfare, Facility Budget & Technical Platforms.

Jan Willem van der Laan

Dr. Jan Willem van der Laan is senior assessor in Pharmacology and Toxicology for the Medicines Evaluation Board, located in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Since 1990 he has been in the Section Pharmacology and Toxicology Assessment at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM, Bilthoven). In this function, he has been responsible for the advices on non-clinical safety aspects for the Netherlands ‘College’, the Medicines Evaluation Board.

He moved with this group in 2012 to the Medicines Evaluation Board located in Utrecht, and stepped aside as manager of the group in 2007. He is still senior assessor in this area. Dr. van der Laan is visiting staff member of the Leiden Academic Center for Drug Research, Division Toxicology, where he is working on a project on in vitro carcinogenicity testing approaches focusing on the role of nuclear receptors.

He is chair of the EMA/CHMP Safety Working Party since 2012, with a renewed mandate in 2015. He is also member of the Nonclinical Working Group of the Pediatric Committee, giving advice about the need for juvenile safety studies.

His contributions to the International Conference on Harmonization started in 1992 on Carcinogenicity Testing. Later he was EU rapporteur for S8 Immunotoxicity and for ICH S6 (R1) Addendum for the Preclinical testing of Biotechnology-derived Proteins. In 2011, he became again a member of the ICH S1 Expert Working Group on Carcinogenicity testing and in 2015 also Regulatory Chair of the Expert Working Group on Juvenile Toxicity testing S11.

SCIENTIFIC ADVISORY BOARD (SAB)

Nicolas Le Novère

Nicolas Le Novère is senior group leader at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge (UK). He studied molecular biology and biochemistry at École Normale Supérieure, evolution at University Paris Sud, biophysics and pharmacology at University Pierre and Marie Curie, where he received a PhD in 1998. His early career at the Pasteur Institute focused on brain nicotinic receptors and their role in tobacco addiction, using both experimental and computational approaches. He moved to systems biology while modeling bacterial chemotaxis at the University of Cambridge (UK). His research then centered on inter- and intra-cellular signals, with a particular emphasis on synaptic plasticity, first at EMBL-EBI and then at the Babraham Institute. He coordinated the development of key software tools to support computational systems biology research, such as BioModels, and was a major figure behind the development of a coordinated set of standards, including SBML, SBGN and the MIRIAM guidelines. He was also instrumental in developing PharmML, a language to encode PKPD models. Le Novère is member of the board of directors of the International Society for Computational Biology and section head for Network and Systems Biology at the F1000. He is associate editor of the journals BMC Systems Biology and NPJ Systems Biology and Applications.

Adriano Henney

Dr Henney has a PhD in Medicine and a research background in cardiovascular disease at the pathological, cellular, molecular and genetic level. After an academic career in laboratories in London, Cambridge and Oxford, he moved into industry spending 13 years with AstraZeneca. Ultimately leading global programmes exploring strategic improvements aimed at reducing drug failure in development, he created and headed a new department that focused on pathway mapping and modelling, which evolved to establish the practice of Systems Biology, supporting projects in discovery and development. Dr Henney has extensive experience in directing and managing large, complex teams across disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries, latterly in the area of Systems Biology and Systems Medicine. His experience in this area led to an invitation to direct the major €50M German national flagship programme, The Virtual Liver Network, at the time the largest Systems Biology programme in Europe, managing over 200 contributing scientists from a range of disciplines, including clinicians, in 36 independent institutions, including industry. Following the end of the programme, Dr Henney was elected to be part-time Executive Director of the Virtual Physiological Human Institute, a not-for-profit organisation promoting the use of computational modelling and simulation to interpret quantitative biological information and understand the dynamics of biological and physiological function. As part of that role, he was responsible for establishing a new partnership with industry, The Avicenna Alliance for Predictive Medicine, a not-for-profit organisation that focuses on developing a policy framework supporting the use of in silico technologies in medicine, and of which he is now Secretary General.

Tim Hammond

Professor Tim Hammond BSc, PhD, FRCPath, has 35 years of experience in pharmaceutical drug Discovery and Development and was a former Vice President of Safety Assessment in the UK for AstraZeneca. He has experience in the selection of Candidate Drugs for Clinical Development as well as a wide experience in regulatory sciences required to take candidate drugs through each phase of clinical development up to and including marketing authorisation. Since retiring from AstraZeneca he has been an independent consultant supporting small, medium and major pharmaceutical companies as well as Universities and Charity organisations devoted to the Discovery and Development of new medicines.

Professor Hammond has experience in supporting Drug Discovery and Development within a wide range of therapeutic areas including oncology, respiratory, inflammation, neuroscience and cardiovascular. For more than 10 years in AstraZeneca Tim was the senior preclinical scientist on the First Time in Human Safety Board. Tim is currently the senior preclinical scientist on the Safety Advisory Board for the Medicines for Malaria Venture.

Professor Hammond is a past President of the British Toxicology Society, is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists, is a member of the American Society of Toxicology and was a founding member of the International Safety Pharmacology Society who awarded him the Distinguished Scientist Award in 2007.

Professor Hammond is an Honorary Professor at the University of Liverpool and until retiring from AstraZeneca was previously Honorary Professor at the University of Birmingham where he completed his PhD.

Chris Evelo

N/A

Aknowledgement

This project has received funding from the Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 116030. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and EFPIA.